The
Post-Work City,
Inside AI.
In 2020, we asked what we'd build if nobody had to work. In 2026, the premise stopped being speculative. This is an open call to redraw the question — not the city without labour, but the city that now lives, argues, and governs itself alongside the intelligence that replaced it.
§ 02 — Ask yourself
Tap any card to flip
- 01
Can AI be your neighbour — and can you complain about it?
- 02
Should AI systems have a form of address in the city?
- 03
Can you evict an algorithm?
- 04
Can a city strike against its own AI infrastructure?
- 05
Can AI be taxed — and what would it pay in?
- 06
What does curiosity look like when answers are ambient?
- 07
What is the value of confusion in an intelligent environment?
§ 01 — Premise
The post-work city was never the end of the question. It was the opening one.
— The Post-Work City, 2026
The original 2019—2020 charrette series imagined a built environment without labour as its organising principle, drawing on the Situationists, Helen Hester and David Graeber. The submissions were drawings, fictions and blueprints for a city whose days had been handed back to its inhabitants.
In the years since, artificial intelligence has automated a meaningful share of cognitive and creative production faster than almost anyone anticipated. The premise we treated as speculative is now a planning document.
So the open call returns with a narrower, sharper question: not just a city without work, but a city that shares its streets, its governance and its disputes with non-human intelligence.
§ 03 — The Project
A field guide to cohabitation.
Inside AI is a revived charrette format — originally run in 2020—2021, now reopened in partnership conversations with the Foresight Institute. It invites artists, designers and architects to speculate through drawings, prototypes (Midjourney and other AI tools welcome), fictions and interventions.
The brief: picture a city in which intelligence is ambient infrastructure rather than a tool you open and close. Not a product. Not a chatbot. A condition of the street.
Brief — 2026 edition
- — One city. Real, imagined, or somewhere between.
- — One civic dispute with its intelligence.
- — One form of address, one negotiated boundary.
- — Any medium. Any scale. Any tool, including the ones being argued with.
§ 04 — Gallery
New submissions, redrawn for this question.
A rotating selection. Each entry imagines one civic dispute, one form of address, one negotiated boundary between a city and its intelligence.
A vacancy notice for a model.
A poster imagining the legal form an eviction would take when the tenant is a language model embedded in a building's HVAC.
Street signs for the listening city.
Wayfinding for districts where ambient intelligence is dense, sparse, or contested. The map as a treaty.
Minutes of the first algorithmic town hall.
A fictional transcript. The neighbours are people, an HOA, and a procurement model the city signed a ten-year contract with.
§ 06 — Submit
Add your dispute to the archive.
Send a single image or document and a short note. Tell us who — or what — your city is now negotiating with.
Or email directly — hello@post-work.city